This page is a compendium of items of interest - news stories, scurrilous rumors, links, academic papers, damnable prevarications, rants and amusing anecdotes - about LAUSD and/or public education that didn't - or haven't yet - made it into the "real" 4LAKids blog and weekly e-newsletter at http://www.4LAKids.blogspot.com . 4LAKidsNews will be updated at arbitrary random intervals.

Thursday, December 31, 2015

A
fifth grade teacher checks student papers at Magnolia Science Academy
#7 in Northridge, one of two schools ordered shut down by LA Unified
School District on August 28, 2014. (Los Angeles Times)

Dec 31, 2015 :: Charter schools: good or bad?

There are few
subjects on which school officials, parents and advocates for students
are more impassioned and divided, which is why the proposal to open
hundreds of new charter schools for Los Angeles' students is shaping up
as an epic education battle. But now a new study out of UC Berkeley — looking specifically at charter school performance in the Los Angeles Unified School District
— provides a more nuanced view, showing that the yes-no, either-or
attitude that tends to dominate the debate is not only misguided but
also counterproductive.

The study found that students who enter
charter high schools within the district are already higher achievers
than those entering traditional public schools. The same was true of
elementary schools, though it's harder to estimate the differences
there. Middle school students started out no more advanced.

Once students are enrolled in charter schools, their academic
growth was slightly steeper in elementary schools than it would have
been in a traditional L.A. Unified school; far steeper in middle school;
but not better at all in high school.

What
does all this mean?

Most importantly, it says wonderful things about
the work that independent charter schools are doing with middle
schoolers. Those students are at the same level as their district school
counterparts when they enter sixth grade, but surge ahead of them over
the next three years. Less happily, the research suggests that charter
schools haven't managed to follow that act in high school.

The Berkeley study also backs up a long-held contention
of charter opponents: Simplistic comparisons of student test scores
from both kinds of schools, charter and district, don't necessarily give
the public useful information — because the students begin at different
levels of achievement. Most likely that's because parents who are savvy
and proactive about their children's education — the kinds of parents
who give their kids a head start on their schooling — are more likely to
find out about charter schools in the first place, attend their
meetings, enter the lotteries for admission and then help their children
succeed at those schools.

Policymakers, school officials and
charter supporters should all be paying attention to the new research.
There have been previous studies on L.A. Unified's charter schools, the
most important of which came from Stanford University
and found that when similar students attended charter and district
schools, the charter students learned more. What the Berkeley study adds
is a first look at differences between students when they arrive at the
schools and at which grade levels charters offer the most advantage.
This information can help educators determine which kinds of schools
will do the most good. L.A. Unified leaders, rather than viewing the
charter push with dismay, should be figuring out what makes charter
middle schools work better and emulating them.

Policymakers, school officials and charter supporters should all be paying attention to the new research.-

The
California Charter Schools Assn. also reacted defensively when the new
research was released. Instead, it should try to figure out what it can
learn from the new data. The researchers aren't saying that charter
schools are without value; on the contrary, they're praising the middle
schools that work so well and suggesting that perhaps they have
something to offer to improve education for disadvantaged students at
all levels. Charter schools should be willing to change their ways in
response to new data; their defensiveness makes them seem a lot like the
traditional public schools they criticize as being hidebound and
self-interested.

More study is obviously needed, both to confirm
the Berkeley findings and to understand the effect of charter schools on
education in Los Angeles Unified. For instance, what's the effect on
district schools if charter schools draw off higher-achieving students?
Obviously, the district schools lose money when state and federal
dollars follow those students to their new schools, but another
important question as the number of charter schools grows is what the
effect will be on the culture of schools and on their achievement levels
as more motivated parents and their children abandon district schools.

It's
tempting to imagine a district in which the two sides worked together
to enhance education. The school board could welcome outstanding charter
middle schools, and learn from those that do the best job. Charter
management organizations could take steps to recruit more low-achieving
students, to level the playing field between their schools and district
schools.

Better
yet, the district and charter schools in it could make the confusing
landscape of school options easier to navigate by creating a one-stop
online shop where parents could find out all about the educational
offerings reasonably close to their homes, including the neighborhood
schools, magnet and pilot schools and independent charters. That site
could include research from studies like those at Stanford and Berkeley,
and information about the rules governing the different schools.
Parents might not realize, for example, that even though some charter
schools have told parents they have to volunteer in order for charter
schools to enroll their children, state law prohibits such requirements.
Or both sides — the charter supporters and naysayers — could keep arguing, but that way, everyone loses, especially students.

______________

CAVEAT 1:Disclosure:
The Times receives funding for its digital initiative Education Matters
from the California Endowment, the Wasserman Foundation and the Baxter
Family Foundation. The California Community Foundation and United Way
administer grants from the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation to support
this effort. Under terms of the grants, The Times retains complete
control over editorial content.

Wednesday, December 30, 2015

John
Marsh, Garden Grove Unified’s assessment director, shows Vivian Nguyen
how to take a sample Smarter Balanced Assessment test on the computer,
while her mother Hang Luong and grandmother Quyen Truong watch during a
parent night Oct. 7, 2015.

December 30, 2015 :: This year
brought several changes to public schools in California, beginning with a
robust economy that added billions of dollars to boost K-12 per-pupil
spending. In a year of multiple developments, EdSource has selected its
top five stories of 2015. As lawmakers in Sacramento crafted the state
budget in the spring, more than 3 million students took on a new
challenge — the Smarter Balanced assessments aligned with the Common
Core. This month a partisan Congress united in the passage of the Every
Student Succeeds Act, signed by President Barack Obama. The new law
replaces the No Child Left Behind Act and gives local school districts
more control while reducing the number of standardized tests.

Two laws passed in the waning days of the 2015 Legislature, and
signed by Gov. Jerry Brown, will have an impact on students and parents.
Under one, former high school students who failed the state exit exam
can receive their diplomas retroactively, beginning Jan. 1, 2016, if
they met all other graduation requirements. The other law, which also
goes into effect on Jan. 1, passed despite protests from hundreds of
parents and eliminated the “personal belief exemption” that had allowed
parents to enroll their children in school without having them
vaccinated.

1. Students take Smarter Balanced assessments for first time

California joined 16 other states around the country in administering
assessments in the spring of 2015 to measure student achievement based
on the new Common Core State Standards in math and English language arts/literacy. The standards, which stress critical thinking and problem-solving, aim to ensure that students acquire 21st century skills in grades K-12 and graduate college and career-ready.

The Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium
created the computer-adaptive tests, which adjusted questions based on
students’ answers, to more accurately pinpoint strengths and weaknesses.
Questions were more difficult for students who answered them correctly
and less difficult for those who did not. Students in 11 other states
and the District of Columbia took a different set of tests aligned to
the Common Core that were created through the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC. California’s tests are part of the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress that also includes science tests and alternative assessments. Students’ scores will be used when measuring future growth.
The state released the scores in September for the more than 3
million California students in grades 3-8 and 11 who took the tests for
the first time following a field test in 2014. The results revealed an
ongoing achievement gap between white and Asian students and those in
other racial or ethnic groups, as well as between students who qualify
for free and reduced price lunches and their peers who did not and
between English learners and fluent English speakers.

2. Every Student Succeeds Act approved by Congress to replace the No Child Left Behind Law

Last summer, it looked like California would be stuck with the No
Child Left Behind Act until President Barack Obama left the White House.
The U.S. House and Senate had passed very different rewrites of the
nation’s primary education law, President Obama threatened to veto
either version, and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced he
was resigning.
But, led by skilled consensus builders Sens. Lamar Alexander,
D-Tenn., and Patty Murray, D-Wash., negotiations came together quickly
last month, and on Dec. 11, President Obama signed NCLB’s successor, the
Every Student Succeeds Act.
A wide range of state educators and advocacy groups have given thumbs
up to the new law’s framework. The new law will allow the Legislature
and the State Board of Education to downplay the role of standardized
tests in measuring school progress and, in keeping with the shift to
local control, give school districts flexibility in setting school
improvement goals and propose their own fixes to problems they identify.
But state leaders are also worried there may be trap doors in the
complex blueprint. Among their initial questions: Will ESSA, as the new
law will be called, require the state to re-create the Academic
Performance Index, the 3-digit measure of school performance that the
State Board of Education would like to kill? And will California have to
keep giving a standardized test based on old science standards until
the state creates a new test based on new standards, which may be three
or four years from now?
Look for some clues in the coming months.EdSource stories on passage of Every Student Succeeds Act: No Child Left Behind rewrite works for California, Dec. 3, 2015In bipartisan vote, Congress overwhelmingly approves new federal education law, Dec. 9, 2015President Obama signs Every Student Succeeds Act, Dec. 10, 2015

3. State Capitol the scene of vaccine showdown

A protest against school public health measures erupted this year after the introduction of state Senate Bill 277,
a proposal to eliminate the “personal belief exemption” that allowed
parents to enroll their children in school without having them
vaccinated.

Related

The number of parents whose kindergartners hold a personal belief
exemption to state-mandated vaccinations is small — 2.5 percent in
2014-15 — but they organized a vocal opposition. Hundreds of parents
queued up at microphones at legislative hearings to say they should have
the right not to vaccinate their children, a position that the U.S.
Supreme Court has rebuked. The court has ruled twice that the
government’s interest in protecting the public from communicable
diseases overrides individual decision-making.
Dozens of education and medical groups supported the measure,
including the California School Nurses Organization, the California
School Boards Association, Children Now and the Los Angeles Unified
School District. Supporters noted that the rate of students holding
personal belief exemptions rose from less than 1 percent in 2000 to 3.2
percent in 2013-14, with the rise in unvaccinated population clusters
linked to disease outbreaks, including the Disneyland measles outbreak
that began in December 2014.
Senate Bill 277 passed the Legislature and was signed into law by
Brown. The longstanding immunization requirements stand: Children will
not be admitted to public or private child care or schools unless they
are immunized against 10 diseases — diphtheria, Haemophilus influenzae
type b (known as bacterial meningitis), measles, mumps, pertussis (known
as whooping cough), polio, rubella, tetanus, hepatitis B and
chickenpox. The law, which goes into effect Jan. 1, also eliminated a
religious belief exemption.
Two exemptions exist: a medical exemption and a homeschooling
exemption, which includes students enrolled in independent study with no
classroom instruction. As of last week, it is still uncertain whether
students who receive special education services, and are thereby
federally entitled to those services, are required to be fully
vaccinated. The California Department of Public Health says parents
should consult their local school districts for information.

4. Diplomas at last for students who failed high school exit exam

Tens of thousands of former high school students who failed the
California High School Exit Exam learned in October 2015 they would at
last receive their diplomas.

Related

Brown signed into law Senate Bill 172,
which requires that school districts across the state retroactively
award diplomas to students who met every other graduation requirement,
but failed the exit exam. The new law goes into effect Jan. 1.
“My reaction is just pure joy and happiness,” former Santa Rosa High School student Telesis Radford,
who failed the test in 2006, said following the governor’s signing of
the bill. “I will be able to take the phlebotomy course that I want to
take and get the job I want to get afterward. I’ll be living my dream
now.”
It’s estimated that at least 40,000 students statewide will qualify for the retroactive diplomas, including at least 8,000 from the Los Angeles Unified School District.
The new law also suspended the exit exam through the end of the
2017-18 school year, while lawmakers and educators determine if the
state should create a new version of the test that’s aligned with the Common Core State Standards, or eliminate it altogether as a graduation requirement in the future.
“The high school exit exam is outdated and does not reflect
California’s new, more rigorous academic standards that emphasize skills
needed to succeed in college and careers in the 21st century,” state
Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson said in October.
“I look forward to convening a task force of teachers, parents,
students, and education leaders to find a more thoughtful approach to
high school graduation requirements that better suits California’s
modern education system.”Nearly 5 million students took the exit exam since it debuted in 2001. It became a requirement for graduation starting with the class of 2006.
Students who failed the exit exam but met all other graduation
requirements were often awarded certificates of achievement, which are
diploma-like documents. Still, many were prevented from applying to
four­-year colleges, vocational training programs, military service or
for jobs that required a high school diploma.
Supporters of the test said it ensured that more students graduated
with basic skills in English and math, helping close the achievement
gap. Meanwhile, opponents argued that the exit exam discouraged some
students from staying in school and that it disproportionately punished
some low-­income children and English learners who were unable to pass
the test.

5. Schools reap benefit of strong economy

If EdSource were to name a Person of the Year for 2015, it would be The Taxpayer.
Revenue from taxes on capital gains, dividends and top income
earners continued to feed state coffers this year, and Proposition 98’s
rules for funding education in high-revenue years steered most of the
increase to K-12 schools and community colleges. Spending under Prop.
98, the chief source of revenue for education, rose $7.6 billion in the
2015-16 budget, to $68.4 billion.
Gov. Jerry Brown, in turn, gave his Local Control Funding Formula an
extra $6 billion. That helped raise per-student funding an average of 11
percent, or $1,011 per student, although, under the formula, districts
with few low-income children and English learners saw less and those
with high proportions of those students received an increase of 15
percent or more. In addition, Brown sent districts about $5.5 billion in
one-time money with few strings attached. He did dedicate about $1
million over three years in competitive grants for career technical
education partnerships between districts and businesses.
Brown budgets conservatively; the Legislative Analyst’s Office
predicts there will be $2 billion more in revenue than the governor
included in the state budget. That money will flow to schools in
2016-17, starting in July. Next year, while not promising to bring as
great a financial bonanza, the LAO predicts an average increase of $530
per student.

Dec 30, 2015 | 7:30 AM ET
:: It’s been a tumultuous year
for America’s schools—one marked by an expanding minority-student
population, an increasingly discontent teaching force, a backlash
against standardized testing, and shifting understanding of education
reform. It’s seen greater attention on areas traditionally dismissed as
nonessential: things like early-childhood education, after-school
programs, and project-based learning. It’s also seen evolving attitudes
toward discipline, with tactics such as restorative justice starting to
replace zero-tolerance approaches, including in high-poverty urban
districts. Debates over how to address disparities in achievement have
been highly politicized. The ed-tech market has continued to grow.

Education
is often touted as a means for boosting social mobility and making
communities more equal, but inequality in school funding and resources
has made that difficult to achieve, especially amid increasing poverty
rates. Segregation in districts, both tacit and explicit, is holding
scores of children back, and performance on math and reading assessments
has remained relatively stagnant. President Obama has just signed into
law an act that will replace the widely despised No Child Left Behind,
but whether it’ll succeed in its goals—boosting the attainment of
disadvantaged students, reducing the amount of testing taking place in
schools, promoting classroom innovation, and so on—is far from
guaranteed.We
reached out to some of the leading scholars of, experts on, and
advocates for K-12 education, and asked them what, as the year comes to
an end, is giving them cause for hope and despair. Below are their
answers, lightly edited for length and clarity.Joshua Angrist, professor of economics at MITReason for despair: “No
Excuses” pedagogy is characterized by a long school day and year, an
emphasis on traditional reading and math, extensive use of Teach for
America interns, data-driven instruction (just as pro sports teams use
data and review video), and an emphasis on discipline and comportment.
Our research team and other colleagues have repeatedly and rigorously
shown the power of this approach to produce life-changing gains for
students who would otherwise do poorly (the “No Excuses” moniker refers
to schools and not students: No excuses allowed for a failure to
educate). I’m worried because the foundations of this success are under
attack: The federal government and many districts now propose to limit
the testing that provides essential feedback and accountability. And it
has been regular, reliable testing that’s laid the empirical foundation
for discussions of school quality and educational inequality. Also
worrying: In Massachusetts and elsewhere, concerns about racial
imbalance in school discipline are making it harder to use suspension to
establish a structured and safe school environment (the primary
beneficiaries of which are poor African American children).Reason for hope: In
the 21st-century, administrations from both parties expanded the
federal role in education, encouraging reform and experimentation to an
unprecedented degree. These policy explorations have been
extraordinarily fruitful, yielding findings that are as clear and
convincing as any in the history of social science. The most important
of these findings is my reason for hope: Although charter schools vary
in quality, schools adhering to “No Excuses” pedagogy (like KIPP, and
many of the charters in Boston, Denver, New Orleans, and New York)
consistently produce spectacular achievement gains for low-income
minority students—enough to close the black-white achievement gap in a
few years of enrollment. We see this in data from randomized admissions
lotteries and from districts (like the New Orleans Recovery School
District) that assign responsibility for failing schools to “No Excuses”
networks. Research designs exploiting lotteries and takeovers take the
guesswork and politics out of the analysis of education policy.Charles Best, founder and CEO of DonorsChoose.orgReason for despair: We
already know teachers go above and beyond to give their students an
excellent education, a lasting love of learning, and the self-confidence
to succeed. But teachers can only do so much with the resources they
have. More and more, projects on our site tell us that teachers face a
large population of young people who go to school cold or hungry. In
addition to school supplies, they are requesting food, warmth and care
for their students. As a society, it’s time to confront that problem.Reason for hope: More
than ever, students understand that they have the power to shape their
own education. We gave young people the access to do that through
crowdfunding this year with an expansion into student-led classroom
projects. After just a few months, hundreds of students have led the
charge by posting projects that matter to their communities. At Ritenour
High School—a 15-minute drive from Ferguson, Missouri—one group started
a reading buddy program with younger students at their school. Their
project, “Reader to Leader: Mentor Program,”
delivered 300 elementary-school books for their initiative. It’s just
one of more than 840 projects that students have successfully gotten
funded on their own terms.Eliza Byard, executive director of the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN)Reason for despair: I
despair over the growing number of so-called Religious Freedom bills
that would grant licenses to discriminate—even for education
professionals working with children—and at the schools that seek
permission to discriminate by getting religious exemptions to their
Title IX responsibilities. My mom was a teacher. She always told me
being with people who are different than you, even if you disagree with
them completely, is one of the most valuable aspects of school. You have
to learn to articulate your ideas and defend your beliefs, and really
listen to understand. “RFRAs” and religious exemptions are about
withdrawing from that social contract. They also do real harm to
youth—when an education professional, a counselor or a nurse, refuses to
deal with an LGBT student, simply because of their sexual orientation
or gender identity/expression, it sends a horrific message.Reason for hope: I
get hope from the dedication and goodwill of great educators
everywhere. I have seen it time and time again: When education
professionals learn about how discrimination and violence hurt their
LGBT students, they want to know what they can do. During my tenure, as
GLSEN has raised awareness of these challenges, we’ve seen an explosion
in adult support for LGBT youth in schools. In 2001, only about 60
percent of LGBT students could identify a single supportive adult in
school. Today, more than 95 percent can. Good people want to do the best
by all the students they work with. When we show them what they can do,
they’re ready to act. And great teachers make all the difference in a
students life—when they have that support, they do better in school,
feel better about themselves, and feel more hopeful and determined about
their own future. It’s a joy to see, and a privilege to support
educators in making that difference.Linda Darling-Hammond, professor of education emeritus at Stanford University and president of the Learning Policy InstituteReason for despair: Fifty years after passage of the Voting Rights Act and 60 years after the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education, America’s education system is still one of the most segregated and inequitable in the Western world. The most advantaged public schools spend many times more than the poorest, and resource allocations exacerbate race and class inequities
in many states. While some students attend schools in palatial settings
offering small classes, expert teachers, and high-tech computers,
others attend a growing number of apartheid schools serving low-income
students of color in crumbling buildings, where a revolving door of
substitutes and untrained teachers try to teach in overcrowded
classrooms lacking enough desks, not to mention books and learning
materials. In the last few years, matters have gone from bad to worse:
As poverty levels for children have grown to one in four nationwide, and
the number of homeless children has doubled, states have been cutting
funds for both education and social services. In 2015, at least 30
states were funding their schools at lower levels
than they had before the Great Recession, with those serving the
neediest students often the hardest hit. Because of the aggressive
neglect of so many our children, the United States has slipped to the level of many developing countries
in virtually every category of child welfare and education. This
situation is perhaps the greatest threat to our national security. In
today’s knowledge economy, we need every young person to be
well-supported and well-educated, able to find a good job and pay taxes
to pay for the social security and health care of the growing number of
seniors if our social contract is to survive.Reason for hope: This
month, Congress passed and the President signed a new federal education
act into law—one that could begin to change our current landscape of
inequitably funded schools, too often focused on a low-level curriculum
unsuited to our 21st-century needs. The Every Student Succeeds Act
(ESSA) replaced No Child Left Behind, a much-criticized law whose
emphasis on high-stakes testing frequently narrowed the curriculum to
the content and format of low-level multiple-choice reading and math
tests, especially in low-income schools. Under this law, inequalities in
educational access grew, while achievement stalled and then dropped on
measures assessing higher-order thinking skills, like the international
PISA tests and the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The new
law encourages states to focus on students’ opportunities to learn (the
resources and quality of curriculum and teaching they receive), as well
as a broader range of outcomes—such as graduation rates, completion of
college-and-career-ready coursework, and richer measures of student
learning that evaluate the critical thinking, collaboration, and
problem-solving skills essential for success in today’s society and
workplaces. If this law is successful in rekindling state innovation,
while focusing them on educational quality and equity, it could provide
the shot in the arm the nation needs to reclaim the American Dream for
the next generation of young people and their families.Lily Eskelsen Garcia, president of the National Education AssociationReason for despair: I
don’t despair; I’m an educator, so I live in a constant state of
hopefulness. But I am frustrated and angry about the inequality that
denies many of our students a great education. Here’s just one example
of what this means: overcrowded classrooms, like the class of 39
fifth-graders I taught in Utah. In those conditions, students don’t get
the individualized, one-on-one time they need to thrive. We are [one of
the richest nations] in the world, yet we have not ensured that all
students, regardless of ZIP code, have the well-staffed and
well-resourced schools they need. We know a well-rounded education
offers students a way out of poverty, yet the schools serving the
poorest students are often impoverished. We say every student who’s able
and has the desire should have access to college, yet we don’t make
higher education accessible and affordable. These disparities are
immoral and costly for our nation. But fighting for equity is our
calling as NEA members. Our frustration and anger just make us fight
harder.Reason for hope: What gives me the most
hope right now is that everyone is focusing on education. “No Child Left
Untested” was such bad policy that it got people’s attention, and it
was the law for more than a decade. It created a crisis in public
education, but we can use this crisis to move forward. President Obama
signed a law that ends test-and-punish policies and opens the door for
real teaching and learning. We finally have an opportunity for
transparency and an opening to make every school a place that inspires
students’ curiosity, imagination, and desire to learn. We will have
meaningful indicators to show us in black and white what educators have
been saying all along: Not all students have what they need for success.
And we can finally begin addressing these opportunity gaps. This could
be a new golden age for education, but we’re not just hoping it happens.
We’re organizing with parents, business leaders, and communities to
make it happen.Anya Kamenetz, lead education blogger for NPR and the author of The TestReason for despair: The
continued tacit acceptance of deep racial and social segregation across
most of our school system, from prekindergarten through colleges and
grad schools. All this year we have been hearing eruptions of despair
across the country from students who have climbed the heights of elite
education only to brave chilly winds of hostility and aggression. Some
members of the highest court in the land seem to believe that the status
quo is just and right. I believe this comes from a basic confusion
about the nature of excellence in education. A high-performing
institution can’t be defined any longer by who is barred from its doors.Reason for hope: The
requirements of No Child Left Behind, with its insistence on math and
reading benchmarks, have been softened. Thanks to the work of countless
researchers, policymakers, and educators, I see real and serious
attention being paid to cultivating and measuring the human tasks of
education: communication, collaboration, empathy, creativity,
self-awareness, and self-management, to name a few.
We have a lot
to learn, but it seems that schools that excel in building these
qualities are places where students are loved and supported by highly
engaged teachers, where they work on getting along better, play
together, satisfy their curiosity, make art, try new technologies, and
explore new ideas. I believe this work will continue to build momentum.
Measuring what matters can help tug schools in the right direction.

David Kelley, founder and chairman of IDEO and founder of Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design

Reason for despair:
In my work across different domains and disciplines, one of the biggest
sources of frustration for me has been the dismal state of K-12
education. Today’s public-school system is the same one we’ve had since
the Industrial Revolution, and it’s no longer relevant. Sure, there are
great ideas and initiatives scattered here and there, but they’re not
making a large enough dent in the system as a whole. And one of the main
reasons the current system is not working is because we don’t value
teachers enough. Though we all collectively say we value education and
that we value our kids, somehow that esteem is not reflected in the
reality of the salaries and status of our educators. And when we don’t
value teachers, the system as a whole suffers. Plus, with more emphasis
on grades and test scores, we don’t make the necessary time and space
for the things we actually want for our kids—things like social and
emotional skills and creativity.

Reason for hope:
As a designer, I have had the great pleasure of seeing the impact of
design on some of the most important innovations of our time. The
biggest surprise for me was realizing that the innovations themselves
are not the most exciting outcome of design—it’s seeing what happens
when people are able to unlock their creative confidence. Whether it’s a
business leader, a politician, the head of an NGO, or a student, anyone
who has opted out of believing that they’re creative, it’s exciting to
see that sudden spark of realization. We see that glimmer in their eyes
and they’re thrilled by the ability to flex those creative muscles to
solve just about any challenge. With a little help, that confidence
grows, and it can have a profound affect on their lives and what they
are able to accomplish. From where I sit, the more people who have
confidence in their creative abilities, the more hope I have for our
future.

Amanda Ripley, Emerson Senior Fellow and the author of The Smartest Kids in the WorldReason for despair: Countries
around the world have become measurably smarter in recent years—which
should be a reason for hope, I know. But bear with me. Fifteen years
ago, teenagers in Poland scored below their American peers on the PISA
test of critical thinking; today, Polish students perform well above our
kids (despite Poland’s significant child poverty and political
dysfunction). A greater percentage of Polish kids now graduate from high
school than our kids. So what’s wrong with that? Well, it’s fantastic
for Poland, but over the same time period, the U.S. has not budged. We
remain subpar in math and science, and average in reading. Even our
richest kids do worse in math than rich kids in 27 other countries. I’d
feel better if we were trying our hardest and not succeeding; but we are
not. We still don’t do the few things we know help all kids in every
time zone: make teacher colleges serious and selective; offer all kids
quality pre-k; and for God’s sake, stop tracking young kids into
different schools and academic programs based on their alleged
abilities. I am waiting for one U.S. state—just one—to do those three
things with relentless focus. I hope I live to see it.Reason for hope: Washington,
D.C., where I live and where my child attends public school, has done
something almost no other U.S. district has managed to pull off. The
city has turned teaching into what appears to be a serious profession.
For real. You can earn $125,000 in fewer than 10 years on the job here.
You can coach other teachers and influence policy and curriculum.
Teachers I know spend more time talking about the intellectual
challenges of the craft than most teachers I meet in the rest of the
country, where many school systems are still too broken for such
conversations. It’s also true that D.C. still has a very long way to go,
and I could list a hundred things that could be better. But I have to
admit it: This city has proven that it is possible to treat teaching
with something close to the respect it deserves—even in America. And
that change is always going to be Step 1. Nothing else will work. Now
just 99 more steps to go.Diane Ravitch, historian of American education and author of Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public SchoolsReason for despair: In
my field, public education is under unprecedented attack by a
bipartisan coalition that calls themselves “reformers.” It includes the
Obama administration, the Republican leadership, the Gates Foundation,
the Eli Broad Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, hedge-fund
managers, ALEC, and rightwing governors. They seek alternatives to
democratically controlled public schools, such as privately managed
charters, for-profit charter schools, virtual schools, and, in some
states, vouchers for religious schools. The reformers’ excessive
reliance on standardized testing as both the measure and goal of
schooling has corrupted education. Because of the reformers’ attacks on
teachers, experienced teachers are retiring early, and the number
entering teaching has dropped sharply.Reason for hope: The
reasons for hope are two-fold: first, the public doesn’t want to
abandon its community public schools. No district or state has ever
voted to privatize its schools. Second, every so-called “reform” has
failed to promote better education or equal opportunity for the neediest
children. Neither charters nor vouchers consistently get better results
for children, unless they exclude the weakest students. Measuring
teachers by student test scores has been a costly failure. The great
majority of the public admires their public schools and their teachers
and wants them to be better, more equitably funded, not eliminated. If
democracy works, these misguided “reforms” will be consigned to the
ashcan of history.Dale Russakoff, reporter for The Washington Post and author of The Prize: Who’s in Charge of America’s Schools?Reason for despair: My
primary reason for despair is the polarized state of relations between
reformers and defenders of the status quo in public education. As these
two groups make war over everything from the growth of charters to the
role of test scores in teacher evaluations, critical issues for children
go unattended. One example is the dire financial state of school
districts in cities where charter schools are growing rapidly. When
children leave traditional public schools for charters, the dollars
leave with them, and districts are unable to downsize as quickly as the
money exits. Districts in Newark, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Detroit,
are facing budget crises that have major consequences for learning, and
they still educate more than half the children in those cities. The only
way to address this issue is for every force in education—politicians,
unions, philanthropists, reformers, parents, community activists—to make
difficult compromises and commitments necessary to stabilize school
districts in the face of charter growth. Polarization makes this
impossible to contemplate, and children are the losers.Reason for hope: I
find hope in the growing attention of politicians and policymakers to
forces outside K-12 classrooms that impinge on learning, particularly
for the poorest children. The mounting emphasis on early-childhood
education, the renewed interest in community schools—with services for
adults and neighborhoods as well as for children—and the movement to
create trauma-informed classrooms for children exposed to violence all
reflect this trend. The education-reform movement argued that poverty
was an “excuse” for failure, but these developments embody a shift in
perspective: America may not have to solve poverty before improving
education for the poorest children, but we definitely have to address
it.Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of TeachersReason for despair: It’s
easy to despair when politicians stoke fear and hatred, and ignore the
millions of Americans struggling to get by. Poverty, wage stagnation,
income inequality, violence, discrimination, lack of opportunity—all of
this impacts our kids. For many, school has been a way out, a safe
sanctuary to grow in the face of incredible odds, to get the skills they
need to succeed in life. But the recession dealt a heavy blow to our
schools and working families, No Child Left Behind took the focus off
equity and put it on testing, and privatizers swooped in to capitalize
on a system struggling from swift, unbridled change with little support,
financial or otherwise. After more than a decade, we know that this
“test, punish, and privatize” strategy hasn’t worked to help all
students succeed.Reason for hope: Today, the
tide is turning in public education. Policymakers on Capitol Hill,
heeding the calls of parents and teachers, have rolled back high-stakes
testing and put the focus back on logical decision-making, listening to
those closest to kids and targeting funding to support the children who
need it most and the public schools they attend. States have the chance
to take the ball and move plans that let teachers teach and students
learn. We know that high-quality early-childhood education, additional
pathways like career-and-technical education, community schools that
provide wraparound services, and changing instruction to include
project-based learning are ways to engage students, address poverty, and
make every public school a place where parents want to send children,
educators want to work and kids are engaged. We need the resources and
support to get there. And by doing so in 2016, we can bring back the joy
of learning and widespread economic opportunity. When we do that, we
will help kids, families, and communities get ahead and stay ahead.Eric Hanushek, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford UniversityReason for despair:
Improved education is the key to the future for the U.S., as our
economy depends on having a highly skilled workforce. While most people
give lip service to the desire to improve schools in order to invest in
the future, they often stop short of endorsing any significant changes
in the schools. This reflects, in my opinion, two factors—an imperfect
understanding of just how important quality schooling is for the country
and complacency with the current situation. The complacency enters from
the fact that the U.S. remains a wealthy country, leading to a sense
that maybe it is alright just to keep going along as we are. From this
complacency springs a myopia that is difficult to overcome but that
could harm the future of the country.Reason for hope: Over
the past five years, my sense of hope and optimism has actually
overtaken despair with U.S. schools. First, there is now broad
recognition that quality teachers can lead to revitalized schools that
are competitive internationally. Second, there is a new willingness by
legislatures in a majority of states to push actively for more
flexibility in hiring, paying, and retaining teachers and for improved
teacher evaluations so that we identify the teachers that we want to
nurture and retain. By focusing attention on the effectiveness of
teachers in raising student achievement, these progressive states are
setting the stage for U.S. schools to climb out of their doldrums and to
compete with the top schools around the developed countries of the
world. For the first time in the past half century there appears to be a
strong possibility that we will serve all of our students and that we
will restore the strength of the U.S. workforce.

Tuesday, December 29, 2015

Threat or hoax? Schools find it’s harder to weigh the risks

Mark Conrad, superintendent of schools in Nashua, New Hampshire,
addresses members of the media at a news conference on December 21
regarding the email threats that closed city schools. - Dean Shalhoup / AP

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA New York Times News Service | from Boston Globe.com | http://bit.ly/1Pvqfcs

12.27.15 | 6:23 PM :: Mark Conrad, superintendent of
schools in Nashua, New Hampshire, got the chilling news last Sunday
morning. An email sent to a school board member threatened a lethal
attack on multiple schools, naming the sites, how students would be
harmed and the date, Dec. 21 — the next day.

“It was a first for us, in terms of the
breadth of the threat and the specificity,” Conrad said. Last Sunday
evening, after consulting with the police, Conrad did something that, as
far as officials in Nashua knew, had never been done there before: He
ordered that all schools stay closed that Monday because of the fear of
violence.

The previous week, the Los Angeles school
system also shut down for a day, in the face of a threat of terrorist
attacks against multiple schools. Last month, the University of Chicago
canceled classes and activities for a day, after discovering a social
media post that talked of killing “16 white male students and or staff”
and “any number of white policemen”; Western Washington University
suspended classes after a post suggested lynching a student leader; and
Washington College in Maryland closed for several days after a
distraught student disappeared with a gun.

Parents drop off children at Gardner Street Elementary, a day after Los Angeles closed its schools because of a threat.

Monica Almeida / The New York Times

But for every such reaction, there have
been decisions not to lock down campuses in the face of a threat. To
name just a few, schools officials in New York City, Houston and Miami
received emails similar to those received in Los Angeles and Nashua, and
two social media users last month wrote that they wanted to kill
African-Americans at the University of Missouri, including one who
stated a plan to “shoot every black person I see.”

None of the threats, it seems, were
serious. Threats of mass violence on campuses have proliferated through
social media, educators say, but most are hoaxes — in fact, most are
never made public.

Yet school officials and campus safety
consultants say they have to take threats more seriously than they did a
decade or two ago, given the history of campus massacres like the one
in October at an Oregon community college and the public’s heightened
fear of terrorist attacks like the one this month in San Bernardino,
California. And they said they could not recall anything like the recent
spate of class cancellations and school closings.

Even when schools do not shut down,
administrators say, they are more likely to order increased security
patrols, or ask people to be on the lookout for a person or vehicle.
After the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, many schools adopted
electronic alert systems, sending text messages to students, parents and
staff members about potential dangers.

“There is a big difference in how we
interpret possible threats today, because of the violence we’ve seen,”
said Will Marling, interim senior director for operations and programs
at the VTV Family Outreach Foundation, a campus safety group created by
relatives of victims of the shootings at Virginia Tech. If a suitcase
was left unattended at an airport 20 years ago, he said, “the reaction
might have been ‘Someone put it in lost and found,’ but now it’s ‘Call
the bomb squad.’”

School buses stand idle as all Los Angeles city schools were shut down in reaction to a threat on December 15.David McNew / Getty Images

On campus, deciding how to respond usually
falls to administrators, who lean heavily on the advice of law
enforcement officials, often have little verified information to go on
and only a few hours to make the call, and have a sense that they might
be second-guessed no matter what. An administrator fears not reacting
strongly enough when lives are at stake, but college and school
officials say there are costs to overreacting — in policing expenses,
lost classroom time, frayed nerves and the danger of encouraging copycat
threats.

“It’s a real dilemma, and it puts
university administration and law enforcement, both, in a tough
position, to evaluate those threats,” said R. Douglas Schwandt, chief of
the University of Missouri police. “Most recently, I think there’s
definitely a tendency to err on the side of caution.”

In Missouri’s case, officials learned of
the social media threats from students in the evening, and within hours,
police had determined that neither one had come from the immediate
area. One person was arrested during the night, and another, farther
away, was arrested late the next morning.

Officials decided not to advise people to
change their routines, but some professors canceled classes and many
students stayed in their dorms and apartments. Schwandt said he could
not guess how the university would have reacted if the threats had
originated nearby, or if neither person had been arrested by sunrise.

Both the substance of the threats and
their context influence administrators’ decisions. The threat at the
University of Chicago was similar to those in Missouri, but it was more
specific. The threat was also posted from somewhere in the city amid
angry demonstrations there over the killing of a black youth by police,
and the university was alerted to it by the FBI.

A
university police officer stands guard on the campus of the University
of Chicago after the FBI reported they were investigating an online
threat of gun violence that would reportedly take place in the Main
Quadrangles of the university at 10:00 AM cst in Chicago, Illinois, USA,
on 30 November 2015.

Tannen Maury / EPA

In Los Angeles, when aides awakened the
schools chancellor, Ramon C. Cortines, with news of an anonymous email
threat, he had barely an hour to decide whether to cancel the school day
and did not know that New York had received virtually the same message.
As Cortines noted, the region was already on edge after the shootings
in San Bernardino days earlier, which were said to have been inspired by
jihadi terrorist groups, as the author of the email claimed to be.

In New York, officials did not learn of
the threat until the school day had started. They quickly learned of the
parallels with the Los Angeles threat, and they noted details in the
email that signaled that it was less than credible. By the time similar
threats reached other cities’ schools, they were old news.

The most unusual case may have been that
of Washington College, where a student who brandished a gun was expelled
from his fraternity and his dorm, and faced both possible expulsion and
criminal charges. He took a gun from his parents’ home, and was seen on
surveillance video buying ammunition in a store, then disappeared.
Though he had made no threats, police warned his college and the high
school he attended, in Cheltenham, Pennsylvania, that he might pose a
danger. The student was later found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot
wound.

Sheila Bair, the college president, said
that when she shut down the college, she was thinking of shootings on
campus by students in the past, including the one just weeks earlier, at
Umpqua Community College in Oregon. And like other school officials
around the country, she said parents and students want strong reactions;
the criticism comes from outsiders.

“It feeds on itself, because the more you
have incidents that do result in harm, the more sensitive people get,
and the more strongly they react,” she said. “You’ve got to put the
safety of the students first. If someone’s harmed, that’s irreversible.”

Conrad, in Nashua, said, “I’ve received
one concern from a parent saying that we should have been open, but the
overwhelming majority has been people saying they were glad we were
closed for the day.”

Photo: Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle Melissa Iglesias (l to r), 15; Abel
Regalado, 16; and Vanessa Martinez, 15, all students at ARISE High
School register at the XQ roadshow on Wednesday, December 9, 2015 in
Oakland, Calif.

December 28, 2015Updated: December 28, 2015 5:09pm
:: A national contest with a $50 million prize pool and a
billionaire backer has spurred teams across the country to reinvent the
American high school, overhauling an antiquated model that hasn’t
changed in 100 years.

At least five winners will each get about $10 million over five years
to make their schools come to life. The competition hopes to stimulate
out-of-the-box thinking, with the eight-figure award luring public,
private and nonprofit contestants, including San Francisco Unified
School District, to vie for the money offered up by Palo Alto heiress
Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

“In towns and cities far and wide, teams will be rethinking and
building public schools that prepare students for the rigorous
challenges of college, jobs, and life,” according to the contest
literature from XQ: The Super School Project.

If the sales pitch sounds familiar, it’s because cash-prize contests
to spur school reform are not new, having been bolstered by several
philanthropic billionaires and a couple of U.S. presidents — often with
less-than-stellar results. Yet, the contests continue, with cash-starved
schools lining up to compete.

The XQ contest — like IQ, but with an X-factor — is funded by Powell
Jobs through her nonprofit Emerson Collective, which advocates for
social issues like education and immigration reform.

‘Wherever life takes them’

The $50 million has pushed her effort into high-profile territory,
prompting hundreds of teams to work on entries that are due in February,
with at least five winners expected to be announced in August. The
competitors represent both traditional and charter schools, and their
new or revamped programs would then launch the following fall.

“Imagine a learning environment you can’t see today that brings the
best of technology, the best of teaching, that truly prepares young
people to make choices, to be ready for wherever life takes them after
high school,” said Russlyn Ali, chief executive of the XQ Institute.

The country’s high schools were last transformed in the early 1900s
to accommodate the industrial revolution and factory work. That new
system required students to spend an hour a day in each course, a
standardization of education based on time spent in classroom seats.
That’s a problem, Powell Jobs said at the September launch of the
contest.

“Nearly every aspect of our daily lives — from how we communicate to
how we work and play — has changed dramatically,” she said. “But our
high schools have stayed frozen in time.”
While the contest leaves the door wide open to the kinds of changes
teams can propose, several themes have popped up in the concepts
submitted and reviewed by XQ officials in November, Ali said.

Using technology is a critical feature of the new high school model.
Personalized and self-paced learning, with students focusing on what
interests them at their own level and speed, is also a common idea.

Photo: Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle | Maya
Martin (l to r), 16, junior West High School, Aaron Jackson, 15,
sophomore West High School stand together as they are interviewed for a
promotional video at the XQ roadshow while Jackson's image is .

More practical lessons

Making academic content relevant to real-world experiences is a core
goal, and one that perhaps requires internships or other real-world
learning. A teacher standing in front of a class teaching facts and
figures, however, is not really on the table.

“You ask a teenager anything, they pull it up on their phone so fast,
the capital of New Delhi to quantum physics,” Ali said. “Imagine a
school that actually taught people how to think rather than what to
think.”

In Grand Rapids, Mich., for example, the district plans to submit an
XQ application for a school located in a public museum, with students
focusing on problem-solving and critical thinking while incorporating
the museum’s whale skeleton and other artifacts.

Yet, education reform experts across the country offer mixed feedback
on the notion of fueling an overhaul of the high school experience with
five schools and $50 million.

“Even though it’s only a handful of schools, it is a lot of money,
and it may offer an opportunity for a set of schools to actually try to
come up with and try to do something that’s potentially radically
different than the past,” said William Corrin, deputy director of K-12
education at MDRC, a nonpartisan social policy research nonprofit. “In
that sense, I can kind of see the vision behind this.”
But it also raises serious questions, Corrin said, including how one
judges success and how to push change across 50 states and thousands of
school systems, each with political autonomy and their own funding
scheme and demographics.

Photo: Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle | Amir Williams, 16, junior Oakland High
School, adds his support to a display by placing a sticker on it during
an XQ roadshow event at Broadway and 8th Street on Wednesday, December
9, 2015 in Oakland, Calif.

‘High schools are obsolete’

Those differences were among the factors that bogged down past
efforts to spark change, like the New American Schools’ “break-the-mold”
initiative in 1991; the $500 million Annenberg Challenge in 1993,
supported by President Bill Clinton; and the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation grants, starting with the small schools movement in 2000 and
“redefining the American high school” five years later.

“America’s high schools are obsolete,” Bill Gates said in 2005. “By
obsolete, I mean that our high schools — even when they’re working
exactly as designed — cannot teach our kids what they need to know
today.”

Now, a decade later, Powell Jobs is repeating that mantra and pushing her chips into the fix-the-public-schools pot.

The difficulty is that while the public school system might need
extensive updating, especially incorporating technology, injections of
money and good intentions don’t seem to translate directly into success,
said Maria Ferguson, executive director for the Center on Education
Policy, a group advocating for more effective schools.

Photo: Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle | Amir Williams (foreground), junior
Oakland High School, looks at his image projected on the XQ We Think
booth during an XQ roadshow event at Broadway and 8th Street on
Wednesday, December 9, 2015 in Oakland, Calif.

Making ‘the same mistakes’

President Obama’s 2011 Race to the Top initiative, arguably the
biggest public buy-in for competition-fueled reform, gave out $4.5
billion in grants to schools and districts focused on transformation and
innovation. Yet, none of the many reforms paid off in long-lasting
change, Ferguson said.

“My entire career has just been watching people make the same mistakes,” she said.

What happens, she asked, when the money runs out? And how do you
navigate elected school boards in the thousands of districts across the
country, not to mention unions and parent groups?

“One is always a little hesitant to be critical of those who want to
do good, wonderful things with their money,” Ferguson said. “You can
give it a jazzy name like XQ, but at the risk of sounding too cynical, I
haven’t heard anything yet that gives me reason to believe this is
anything different.”

XQ officials believe the competition is already creating a movement,
with 1,700 teams forming to submit entries or brainstorm ideas. While
only a handful of schools will be selected, Ali said the organization is
looking at how to support new school models, helping them develop and
spread.
“It is fair to say this is the most concentrated grant program, the
largest individual school grants that anyone has contemplated,” said Tom
Vander Ark, chief executive of Getting Smart, a for-profit education
consulting group, and the former head of the Gates Foundation.

“There’s no question they’ll get several dozen extraordinarily good
proposals,” he said. “It’s quite likely these will be five extraordinary
schools that really do rethink the learning environment and probably
deploy technology in new and interesting ways.”

In San Francisco, school district officials are working on their XQ
entry, getting feedback from middle and high school students about what
they think high school should look like, district officials said.
Specifics about where the school would be and how it would teach have
yet to be ironed out.
Oakland student Camille Brewster, 17, believes she has the recipe for
a winning entry. A great high school experience, she said, should
include internships and maybe studying abroad, but definitely life
skills to navigate what a young person will actually encounter after
graduation, like how to get a job or communicate effectively.

Reciting the Pythagorean theorem or calculating the speed of a train leaving Boston is probably not on that life skill list.

“I feel like we are put in a box in high school, and we need to step
out of that,” said Brewster, a senior at MetWest High, where students do
internships and have customized learning plans. “I think my school is
the kind they’re trying to create.”

Congress makes school attendance a national priority

By Tom Chorneau. SI&A Cabinet Report | http://bit.ly/1IBKW5x

Posted December 15, 2015 :: (District of Columbia) Increasing the emphasis on getting more of the
nation’s K-12 students to show up for class, the newly-approved federal
education law will require Title I schools to report chronic
absenteeism broken down by subgroup.

The Every Student Succeeds Act, signed by President Barack Obama last
week, does away with the most onerous accountability mandate on schools
– adequate yearly progress – while giving states new flexibility to
design and implement their own systems for measuring student
performance.

But Congress retained some key requirements such as annual
assessments in grades three through eight and once in high school for
math and English language arts, as well as the need to continue to
identify persistently underperforming schools.

ESSA calls on states to create accountability systems that use
multiple measures to gauge student outcome. The bill requires that
states receiving Title I money must also collect and report “measures of
school quality, climate and safety…”

Among the metrics listed that must be broken down by subgroup is chronic absenteeism – both excused and unexcused.

“It is good news that chronic absence data is included in the ESSA
reauthorization for Title I schools because it moves us closer to the
day when all districts will be using chronic absence data and acting on
it,” said David Kopperud, an education programs consultant with the
California Department of Education who helps oversee statewide
attendance issues.

Long overlooked as a vehicle for improving public education,
attendance is increasingly viewed as a fundamental first step in
boosting student performance – especially among early learners.

According to a study from Johns Hopkins University, chronic
absenteeism in kindergarten was associated with lower academic
performance in first through third grade. Johns Hopkins researchers also
found a strong relationship between sixth-grade attendance and the
percentage of students graduating on time or within a year of their
expected high school graduation.

The University of Chicago reported last year that attendance and
grades were the two greatest predictors of later academic performance
among middle school students.

A number of states have already taken steps to address chronic
absenteeism by making schools keep better track of attendance rates and
report the numbers publicly.

In California, for instance, as many as 230,000 elementary students
missed more than 18 days in 2014-15. As a result, lawmakers there have
included attendance as one of the educational goals that districts must
report on and set goals to improve – especially for low income students,
English learners and foster youth.

The language adopted by Congress is similar:

‘‘(viii) Information submitted by the State educational agency and
each local educational agency in the State, in accordance with data
collection conducted pursuant to section 203(c)(1) of the Department of
Education Organization Act (20 U.S.C. 3413(c)(1)), on –
‘‘(I) measures of school quality, climate, and safety, including
rates of in-school suspensions, out-of-school suspensions, expulsions,
school-related arrests, referrals to law enforcement, chronic
absenteeism (including both excused and unexcused absences), incidences
of violence, including bullying and harassment;…”

Kopperud points out that the new law requires chronic absenteeism
rates to be disaggregated by all the significant subgroups, including
racial and ethnic subgroups as well as subgroups for homeless students
and foster youth.

He noted that ESSA will also allow Title II funds to be used for
professional development in chronic absence reduction strategies.

One potential issue for California schools could be the definition of
“chronic absenteeism.” The state sets the mark at any student missing
10 percent of the school year, while the new federal Title I rule is
based on missing 15 days of the school year.

_____________________

How A School’s Attendance Number Hides Big Problems

By Elissa Nadworny,Texas Public Radio |http://bit.ly/1YMft7D

Image credit: LA Johnson / NPR

Posted December 7, 2015 :: Every morning, the familiar routine plays out in hundreds of
thousands of classrooms: A teacher looks out over the desks, taking note
of who's in their seats and who isn't.

On any given day, maybe there are one or two empty chairs. One here,
one there. And that all goes into the school's daily attendance rate.

But here's what that morning ritual doesn't show: That empty desk? It
might be the same one that was empty last week or two weeks ago. The
desk of a student who has racked up five, 10, 20 absences this year.

It's called chronic absence. The official definition: missing more than 10 percent of the school year — just two days a month.

And the real-life implication: a warning sign for a student on the brink of failing or dropping out.
Experts call chronic absence an "unseen force" hidden behind average
daily attendance figures of 90 or 95 percent that schools hail as a sign
of success.

"Daily attendance averages tell you how many students show up every
day," says Hedy Chang, who heads Attendance Works, a nonprofit education
policy group. "But not how many are missing so much school that they
are headed off track academically."

Yet there's a growing effort to pull that chronic absence figure out
of the shadows. The U.S. Education Department has taken note: Next year,
for the first time ever, it will release school-level data on how many
U.S. students missed 15 or more days of school.

The Math Problem

To understand how deceptive attendance numbers can be, take a look at
Baltimore. This year, the elementary attendance rate in the Baltimore
city public schools is 93 percent. Anything in the 90s is an A — so
that's good, right?

But, look more closely and you find that nearly 20 percent of
students in grades one through five have missed more than 20 days of
school. That's more than 6,000 children.

"As a statistic, attendance can hide patterns," says Mark Gaither,
principal at Wolfe Street Academy, an elementary school in Baltimore. He
would know. Ten years ago, his school was in bad shape. Test scores
were terrible, and the state was threatening to take over.

But when he arrived, he focused on attendance, then in the low 90s. "Not abysmal," he thought at the time.

He soon discovered that day in, day out, it was the same students who
were not showing up. And these kids, he says, "were missing 30 percent
of their education."

Not surprisingly, these were the students
struggling the most in basic things like learning to read.
"That was the performance gap," Gaither says. "The devil is in the
details — the devil is in the individual child. If we don't get this kid
to school, they're going to fail."

So he launched a kid-by-kid campaign — heavily focused on data — to
raise attendance. And today, the school has just a handful of
chronically absent kids — and much higher test scores.

Taking A Different Approach

A growing number of school districts are doing what Gaither did: using data to attack this problem head-on.

Patterson Elementary School in southeast Washington, D.C., is a good example.

Every Thursday morning, Principal Victorie Thomas convenes a small
group in the school's conference room. Sitting around the oval table are
several social workers, the attendance monitor and a City Year
volunteer. They all have a stack of paper: a kid-by-kid list of absences
of the school year to date.

What they're doing is searching for patterns, highlighting names of
students who have missed three or more days. Then, they share from their
different perspectives what they know about each student.

They start with the youngest kids. They talk about home visits,
discuss what community resources may be available and make plans to call
families and talk to teachers about what might be going on.

"We go child-by-child because that's how important it is to us," says Thomas. "One day can make a big difference."